why i still bird

notes on attention with a generous number of hyperlinks

I’m often surprised that I still care about birds. I started birdwatching (or in the more active form, birding) five years ago with none of the usual gateway nature drugs (science olympiad ornithology, central park fanatic, etc.) I started birdwatching as an experimental unstressor. A lot of what I enjoyed at first wasn’t even related to birds; I just liked going outside and seeing the beautiful nature preserves of the South Bay. But then I got a camera, and photographing new species made me feel like I was playing like Pokémon Go in real life.

It only took me a few months to capture 90% of the birds in the San Jose suburbs. So why did I stay?

What kept me going was one stupidly obvious but underutilized insight. Even the most drab of birds, the ones I considered boring and couldn’t stand taking another photo of (looking at you California Towhees, Black Phoebes, Dark-Eyed Juncos), were never new. They had always been there, and I was the one ignorant. Restated, I kept birding because it changed the way I saw the same world I had always been living in.

This is not an article to convince you to birdwatch, although it probably couldn’t hurt. What I want to do is understand why we’re not observing as much as we could, and how we can push back.

To start, we’re accepting information organization and boundaries without question. The most obvious example of this are curated feeds, which inundate us with clustered recommendations and rob us of the space to develop individualized tastes. Look at the ads in any subway line in New York and it’s easy to see from the ads that most info these days seems to find us, rather than vice versa. Aside from feeds, a slightly less obvious example is the way in which I’ve seen college peers treat course syllabi. In university, I’ve heard peers talk about courses as if they were God-given pieces of text, universally known and impeccably designed. I rarely saw students interested in why they were studying something, and what choices were exercised when one distills decades of work into a 5-month learning plan. In the most humorous case, a student told me they wanted to take the Analysis II course on basic measure theory and fourier analysis because Analysis II typically refers to vector analysis and graduate school programs wouldn’t be the wiser. What’s often not discussed is that these boundaries which slice up the sticky substance of math (or any subject for that matter) can be as arbitrary and fine as the chosen lines separating Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. This only became clear to me when three of my classes talked about probability measures on the same day, and on another day two of them covered the Discrete Fourier Transform.

It also probably doesn’t help that we’re dealing with everything at a much higher level of abstraction (cs majors, what’s a PMOS? I don’t know.)

Moreover, knowledge is increasingly becoming centralized as opposed to experiential. I’m definitely guilty of this - my notes have pages of exercises from famous math & statistics courses from various universities. In hindsight, I’m slightly embarrassed of them. They represent my inability to figure things out, and a reliance on a well-beaten path someone’s already laid out for me. Experiential learning is much harder. It requires following a vague direction with no good immediate reward feedback. But on the bright side, you’ll develop intuition (a.k.a taste if you’re in SF) and for what it’s worth it’s probably AGI-safe¹.

I want to reiterate that structured information is not fundamentally problematic, and has its uses. But today’s broad access to huge amoutns of information does not provide us with a deep perception of our world, only a frictionless way to navigate through someone else’s organization of it.

I think we can look at the birds and so much more. As maybe something concrete, here’s three things I think that can make a difference:

• Boredom. Intentful observation requires forming exploring new thinking patterns. It’s hard to do that when you’re already stuck in your routine.
• Intention. Investigate why you’re doing (scrolling your phone, going to a certain shopping aisle, etc.) Without doing so, you won’t be able to even take steps to overcome the psychological uncomfort that comes from trying something new.
• Reading. This one’s kind of random, but great fiction often revolves around forgotten symbols (it would feel wrong to not mention mockingbirds here.)

It’s often said that everything that can be written is already written. In that spirit, perhaps this piece is a summarization of a few lines Steve Jobs in 1994:

“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” Steve Jobs in 1994.